16 comments:

Wow, this is awesome Kari, thanks for linking it! Hundreds of details to assimilate. I'll have to watch this several times. Having just a built a Queen Anne foot stool, I want to build a QA side chair. The process shares many similarities to what they show in this video.

Fantastic find Kari. The tenoning fixture with the horizontal saw for cutting the shoulders is very nice. I think a lot of hand-tool centric woodworkers are not aware of just how many jigs and fixtures were used for mass production before the industrial revolution. Roubo is chock full of them.

This is really good stuff! George Ellis, in "Modern Practical Joinery" (1903) shows a similar freehand spindle-moulder setup called a "dumpling block". I have only contemplated setting one up, and seeing it in action is not reassuring.

Great find Kari. Interesting to see the mixture of industrial technology and traditional hand tool skills blended together. Also sobering to think that all those boys would soon be pulled into the trenches of WWI. Perhaps another reason many of these skills were so difficult to pass on, both France, England, and Germany lost an entire generation.

Safety was not a great concern at the time! My great grandfather was 15 years old, living in France, in 1912, when he lost two fingers in a shop class. He could have been one of the students in this video! It is also sad to imagine that most of the students shown in this video went to war only two years later, and that most of them did not come back...

Thank you for all the comments. Lots of good tips in that video for sure. There are other similar videos on that site if you look around. I sure wish I'd paid more attention in my high school French class...

It hadn't occurred to me that those young boys would be going to war soon. That brings a whole other perspective to the film.

Julien, considering the lack of safety features on the power tools it's no wonder your grandfather was injured in shop class. We're fortunate that we have safer machinery to work with now.

LOved the vids! Kind of creepy in a way! I had recently seen some old photos of men working in a saw mill in the USA during the 1800s sometime. Wished I could have just remembered where I had seen them i would have posted a link! Thanks again for the vids, great share!